What to do with all the heat?

September 28th, 2009

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When I started with Border Stylo one of my first questions was “Where is/are our server/servers for the office?” “Well….we have a time capsule.”

We needed to change that quickly. Even for simple things like DHCP and control of our internal DNS not to mention centralized resources such control of our own wiki, etc.

When you are with a startup you should be as money conscious as possible so I found a used HP DL 380 that had raid and 6 × 15K HDs. Perfect for our needs. But, as we all know, servers are loud.

Where are we going to put this noisy, but necessary, item? We tried it out on a table near my desk. As a person who has spent way too many hours in way too many data centers this was just fine for me. For developers who have not learned to tune out the incessant hum? Not so much.

As we are currently in a live/work loft building there is not a “data closet” where I can stash this server. What else to do? Of course!! Run a cable and put it in the bathroom!! This worked really well.

For a while.

Until you want to add more servers.

As we needed to add more servers to do all of the things that a startup needs the bathroom became more like a sauna and a rather unacceptable place for my precious servers to reside.

(To head off the “Why didn’t you get 2 or 3 really powerful servers and virtualize everything?” argument: short answer (and another post.) We are developing some very custom things. It is not useful to try replication between VMs on a server. You cannot monitor machine performance correctly when there are other VMs that may be using resources when you are benchmarking. It is much better to go out and buy some used $100 machines (we bought 10 for 1k) and use them. Use a span port to monitor traffic between machines, etc. Much better for benchmarking in the long run. We try to power them down when not in use. Our wake-on-lan setup kicks butt.)

So here we are in an office (I had no input in by the way) with no place to put servers and a desperate need to have servers. A colocation facility you say? Sure…works well until you want to stress test something. Being limited by a couple of DSL lines there is no way I could generate enough traffic to test what we need.

I have been in the SF Bay Area for 17 years and this is not a problem I have ever faced. There are always server closets with AC or a mini DC in the building right? Not in LA. Not where we are.

I started my research. I narrowed it down to two options: water cool the little suckers or an “acoustical cabinet.”

The true tinkering geek in me really wanted to go water cooling. I did a lot of research on this and it would be really fun. They have these amazing top of rack multi pump cooling units that would serve all of our needs. Get the correct tubing and heatsinks, assemble it all, and presto you have a fairly quiet system that would stay cool with minimal noise. This was a known.

Then there was the unknown, the acoustical cabinet. Have you ever tried to do research on one of these? I can tell you….there is not much out there. From all of the time I spent looking into this there are two manufacturers out there: the less expensive looks like a server rack company and the more expensive looks like a piece of office furniture company. Decisions decisions. Our VAR (Value added reseller) spoke with both companies and of course they both had the best product for the price. Then it came down to another factor as one was available in 6 to 8 weeks and the other was available to be picked up by one of our staff the next day. Game. Over.

Here was something that I could use over and over without swapping components as I would have to do with a water cooled system. I would not have to shut down all of the servers in the rack to add components as our liquid cooled solution would have had me doing. “Hi. Super Phil will be down tomorrow to pickup the rack.”

How has it been?

Lets say that there are, at times, 12 servers running in a cabinet next to my desk. I can tolerate it. All of the others can tolerate it. Think prop plane vs jet engine.

Now it is getting close to the point where we are going to stage the equipment for our real server environment.

I guess I have two choices: I am going to be looking at another one of these server racks or

ATTENTION EXECUTIVE TEAM: We need a new office that has a minimum of a climate controlled data closet.

Tagged with: servers

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